On the eve of the 2013-2014 Pittsburgh Addy Awards, we've asked the creative chiefs at the six local agencies that took home the most Addy awards at last year's ceremony to pick their personal best work of 2013 — and to tell us why. Click on the photo to the right to begin a slideshow of their work.

This year's award program, run by the Pittsburgh Advertising Federation, takes place Friday evening at the Carnegie Science Center. The winners weren't leaked to us, but we'll let you know who they were after the event.

Last year, 89 Addys were handed out. Below, the six agencies who sent us their best work from 2013 — Animal, Brunner Inc., Garrison Hughes, Marc USA, Mullen and Wall-to-Wall Studios — discuss their selections.

If we had to pick one, it would probably be the short film we did with Nationwide on behalf of the National Fair Housing Alliance, titled “Seven Days.”

It was an honor to be involved in retelling such an important historical event — the passage of the Fair Housing Act following Martin Luther King’s assassination. This was the first project we did with Nationwide, and the trust they put in us was amazing. Nationwide was fearless. Once the general concept was approved, we worked closely with their team to research and write the piece as well. It was an opportunity to show off the breadth of our team’s talents — writing, designing, shooting, editing.

My favorite piece of work last year was done for the Rite Aid Foundation’s KidCents round-up at the register program. Proceeds go to help address health and wellness needs of kids in Rite Aid communities. It was my favorite because it featured real kids facing real hurdles in life. The words you hear are the kids themselves, saying the lines in their own beautiful voices. They are lovely, they are hopeful and they’re just fantastic, brave young people for whom I have so much admiration and respect.

My favorite single piece from last year would have to be the Living WWII Statue we created. It was one component of our campaign to raise funds for a permanent southwestern Pennsylvania WWII Memorial in Pittsburgh.

We hired a performance artist, bronzed him in an infantry uniform and placed him on a bronzed pedestal in the middle of Market Square. The simple message? This is a temporary memorial, and WWII veterans deserve a permanent one. To watch people approach the bronzed statue and jump back when he moved, was to see our work quite literally come to life.

The dedicated and talented team from Brunner planned and staged the entire Market Square event to be reminiscent of a USO show, complete with a swing band, dancers and WWII Veterans on hand to tell their harrowing stories. The event in Market Square was the centerpiece of an integrated campaign that included television, radio and outdoor, along with bronzed talk balloons attached to existing statues like Mr. Rogers, pointing out that WWII Veterans deserved a memorial of their own.

The outdoor component of the campaign was awarded a Gold Obie Award as one of the best outdoor executions in the country last year. But the most meaningful measure of success was the ribbon-cutting of the new permanent WWII memorial, which took place a few months ago.

It is an outdoor board from the campaign we did for the Heinz History Center’s traveling exhibition, “1968: The Year That Rocked America.” It was a tough assignment to crack. There’s no simple way to define what went down in 1968. Our nation endured the Vietnam War, assassinations, protests and the bitter fight for civil rights. We also experienced women’s lib, drugs, a new breed of music and the first-ever images of earth taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8. We had to find a way to take these diverse events and combine them into a campaign as provocative as the History Center’s new exhibit. Some of the work featured examples of the clash of cultures that erupted in 1968. Headlines such as “From LBJ to LSD,” “From Mr. Rogers to Mrs. Robinson” and “From Black Power to the White Album” enticed visitors to relive the moments that divided our nation and defined a generation. Other pieces, like this one, reflected the psychedelic look and language of the ’60s. When the smoke cleared, attendance at the exhibit spiked during the campaign. And our client felt the love.

A piece we did for the Children’s Museum was our best representation of our creative product for 2013. This is a brand book we developed for them, and it’s a personal favorite for the following reasons: This piece is rooted in a planning and research foundation, which helped to set the strategy and thereby allowed the creative team to tell the Children’s Museum story in a way that really got to the core, fundamental reason of why the Museum exists — to allow a child’s creativity to flourish. Because the strategy and insight were so authentic, the creative end result is a buoyant, fun and has, yes, child-like exuberance in guiding the museum toward a complete and relevant brand expression. It was a great experience and process for the agency as a whole.

When I look back at a successful project, the ones that stand out are where the client gets excited and has absolute faith in the studio’s creative concept, and the consistency and discipline to follow through and address every touch point of the branding experience, to let us dive deep on execution. That and a really great idea. For me it was Wall-to-Wall’s work for the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts — a month-long celebration of U.S. premiere works from artists around the world. It was a true collaboration between us and the client, The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. They were confident enough, and trusted us enough, to go in a direction that challenged the way they traditionally marketed the event, and really embraced the overall concept. The result was a simple, bold, visually impactful campaign for festival that pulled everything together in a fun compelling way. And they had a 40-foot-tall rubber duck. How could you go wrong?